If Only More Such Stories Could Have Been Told: Ways of Remembering Resistance

This article considers how greater attention to the memory of resistance might alter the parameters of contemporary efforts to reckon with systematic abuse. I take the Eichmann Trial, which featured numerous testimonies on resistance, as a point of departure for considering the implications of distinctive ways of remembering resistance. The article begins by examining how narratives of heroic resistance were integrated into the trial, and considers the responses of two prominent commentators: Hannah Arendt and Haim Gouri. Arendt’s comments offer insight into how exemplary resistance informs the recovering of judgment and agency as responses to complicity, whereas Gouri’s account underscores the role of “unheroic”and anti-heroic testimony in addressing the limitations of exemplars